In the suburbs of Los Angeles, your futureawaits

Los Angeles is nearly built out. The last empty bits
of the metropolis are already being fitted into a titanic grid of
neighborhoods that extends 60 miles from south to north and from
the Pacific Ocean deep into the desert. The closing of the suburban
frontier in Los Angeles ends a 100-year experiment in place-making
on an almost unimaginable scale. And because of its notable
failures (a history of racial segregation being the worst),
I’m grateful that it’s nearly over.

Still,
suburban L.A. represents an enduring ideal. All those miles of
sunny streets reflect a longstanding consensus about the way
ordinary people ought to be housed, beginning with the
turn-of-the-20th-century belief in the power of a "home in its
garden" to improve the lives of working people, and ending in the
1950s with affordable, mass-produced housing for average Joes like
my dad and his neighbors.

I still live in my
parents’ 957-square-foot house, on a block of more tract
houses in a neighborhood of even more of the same. There are
Westerners who wouldn’t regard a house like mine as a place
of pilgrimage, but my parents in the 1950s did. They weren’t
ironists; they were grateful for the comforts of their
not-quite-middle-class lives. Those who came to Lakewood —
and still come — didn’t aspire to more, but only to
enough.

My suburb has its share of problems. That’s
what you get when you throw together tens of thousands of
working-class husbands and wives without any instruction manual and
expect them to make a fit place to live. Urban planners tell me
that my neighborhood, like many others in L.A., should have been
bulldozed long ago to make room for some better paradise of the
ordinary.

Yet mass-produced and working-class Lakewood
stubbornly persists, still loyal to an idea of how a neighborhood
can be made. It’s an incomplete idea, but it’s still
enough to bring out 400 dads and moms in the fall to volunteer as
park coaches, and 600 volunteers to clean up the weedy yards of the
disabled on Volunteer Day in April, and over 2,000 residents to
listen to summer concerts in the park.

Mine isn’t a
"teardown" suburb. It’s a neighborhood that is making some
effort to build itself up.

And even though it’s
never noted by the "smart growth" cheerleaders, suburban L.A. is
actually something of a model for urban planners. Even Oregon,
which 30 years ago adopted strict growth limits to prevent the
"Californication" of its landscape, has looked to L.A. for
inspiration. After a 1999 study of the nation’s 50 largest
urban regions, the regional authority that manages development in
Portland and three adjoining counties concluded that, "with respect
to density and road per capita mileage, (Los Angeles) displays an
investment pattern we desire to replicate."

The density
of Portland’s metro area is about 3,500 persons per square
mile. The city’s master plan for the year 2040 calls for
increasing the density to about 7,000 per square mile, just like
that of Los Angeles today. In Lakewood, entirely built out in the
1950s, the density is already 8,000 persons per square mile.

My neighborhood, with its small lots and
pedestrian-friendly streets, shows that more density is not a bad
thing. Yet in choosing to pack more people into a limited space,
Portland is also getting crowded freeways, worse air quality from
all those cars idling in traffic, and an over-hyped light rail
transit system — all just like L.A.’s. That’s
either ironic, or else simply what happens when cities reach their
limits, however they’re defined.

Suburban Los
Angeles isn’t what many Westerners would regard as their
preferred urban planning model, but given that many planners want
to increase housing density and decrease highway miles per capita
(and given the overwhelming preference of most Americans for
neighborhoods that look like mine), it’s easy to predict what
the metropolitan West will look like in the future.

Welcome to the future, Westerners: It’s L.A.

D.J. Waldie is the author of Where We Are Now:
Notes from Los Angeles.